Microsoft Brings Virtual Reality in Internet Explorer

FREMONT, CA: Microsoft has achieved virtual reality through Internet Explorer. The company demonstrated it in its annual developers conference. Enhancements to its Visual Studio software development toolkit are also on the cards as the firm plans to build a common code for apps for its Windows, Windows Phone and Xbox platforms.

The company also demonstrated a path-breaking physics engine that uses cloud infrastructure rather than local machine’s hardware resources. This could greatly influence gaming in future.

Steve Guggenheimer, Microsoft corporate vice president, was able to get a virtual scene that was generated on a smart phone using WebGL programming language to appear on the Oculus Rift headset. He achieved this by just deleting 13 lines of code into the scene using a service called Babylon.js.
“One of the keys to making this work is that we’re able to handle this loop at 200Hz. Any of the other browsers out there don’t have that capability. But it’s also the speed of the PC ecosystem” the USB peripherals, the development tools, that let developers create these experiences with an incredibly low amount of effort, Guggenheim said.

When it comes to cloud gaming, Microsoft has been at the top of the game with its release of cloud- gaming company OnLive. OnLive uses dedicated servers to run 3D games, streaming the action to client PCs over the Internet. Microsoft is definite to revolutionize cloud business as Microsoft’s Cloud Assist appears to render physics on Microsoft’s servers, lending realism to the scene without actually controlling it.

In order to foresee Microsoft’s Cloud Assist technology in action Guggenheim and Shewchuk of Microsoft conducted a demonstration which involved a simulation firing rockets into simulated buildings, which then exploded. The duo showed the scene rendered on a local machine, which crawled along at frame rates in the single digits. They then added Cloud Assist, which improved performance dramatically informs, Mark Hachman of pcworld.